Posts Tagged ‘online community’

StackOverflow, StackExchange, etc. and its whole community rather saddens me these days. It seems the assburgers who dump their angst on Wikipedia have found a new home making StackExchange sites as unfun as possible. The situation isn’t helped at all by the recent rabbit-like proliferation of SE sites which exhibit so much subject overlap as to make determining the “proper” place of most posts nearly impossible — all that has done is given the Post Police reason, in every case, to force re-posting, closing, pausing, deletion, or otherwise official vandalism of valid posts and answers.

Let’s say I have a question about travelling to Austria to see historical sites. Let’s put it in travel. But if the question is phrased in such a way as to reference a specific historical event, like say a little battle in which Polish king demonstrated how much he appreciated the Ottoman visitors, then it is an almost certain thing that some twerp who knows nothing about history or travelling in Austria will promptly vote to close or move the question on the grounds that it belongs on the SE site for history and not travel. The post will face the same fate once it arrives there, of course, and the asker will be helpless.

This sort of thing goes on all the time between StackOverflow, “Programmers”, and “Workplace” as many questions professional programmers have cut sharply across all three lines.

Another annoyance is unnecessary Post Police comments like the one left on this post. Sure, I was being silly in the way I did it, but my response represents the general consensus of the Erlang community on this particular subject and is, in essence, a fairly standard response. Obviously not good enough for 19-year-old Alexy Schmalko, Protector of the Realm.

Whatever happened to the sense of community I used to get from, you know, the community? Did that all die when usenet got retarded in the early 90’s? Did it evaporate with the coming of the cool web kids? I’ve probably got kids somewhere near his age…